The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides - 3.5/5

A fascinating book, deceptively simple, quick to read, yet layered with depth and mystery. It’s one where you can’t possibly catch every detail on the first pass; moments snag your attention before slipping away, echoing how the Lisbon girls drift past the group of boy narrators, no matter how closely they watch.

The narration is striking: a collective “we,” a chorus of unnamed men looking back on their adolescence and the suicides of five sisters in suburban Michigan. Eugenides captures the horror of the American mundane, and the boys’ obsessive, fractured memory of the girls, who are never quite fixed in place. Crucially, they are not manic pixie dream figures. Eugenides makes it clear, the boys’ infatuation blinds them. We glimpse the sisters’ real, individual lives, but only briefly, before the boys’ gaze distorts them again.

The novel is also a psychological horror, not from the outside world but within the Lisbon home itself, where the mind kills, and ordinary objects, overlooked by everyone else, carry a terrifying weight of death. Through the boys’ catalogued relics (“Exhibits #1 through #97”), we glimpse the sisters’ shared existence, full of sibling rhythms and fleeting normality. They were more than symbols, though the narrators never deserved to truly know them.